JANUARY 7, 2020 – We have good friends who are skiing beside the Matterhorn outside Zermatt, Switzerland. I’m envious, but I can’t begrudge good taste combined with good fortune. Sunday, I thought about our friends as I hiked to my own version of Switzerland and the Matterhorn.
It was a rough go. Our alley was a veritable wind tunnel. Garbage bins lay strewn every which way, like downed sentries after an enemy raid. Discarded Christmas trees, like post-holiday tumbleweeds, rolled aimlessly between garages. I forged ahead, skis and poles in hand; ski boots in my backpack.
“Little Switzerland” lies a short distance away (our house is in central “France”), so soon I’d reached the frontier. Espying a couple of weekend cross-country skiers struggling along an icy course, I headed straight for the backside of the downhill ski slope, “St. Moritz.” The slope yields to what I pretend is the Matteral Valley. Facing it on the western boundary of the hilly golf course—I mean, “Little Switzerland”—is a steep hill . . . the “Matterhorn.”
While the front side of “St. Moritz” was crowded with downhill skiers, the rope tows on the backside weren’t running. I’d have the whole backside to myself. A couple of days before, it had been groomed into perfect corduroy. The subsequent 48-hour thaw-freeze-thaw cycle, however, had ended with a hard freeze.
Like travelers loaded with bulging baggage hurrying to the same train in crowded Zurich, a crowd of cumulus clouds scudded across the sky. Now and again the sun burst through between clouds and reflected sharply off the ridges of the groomed corduroy.
Fortunately, there was enough structure for the inner edges of my skis to “catch.” I skated up the hill that usually downhill skiers race down. At the top is a small plateau (in reality, an expansive golf tee), where skiers from the frontside of St. Moritz pop off the rope tow and assemble themselves before plunging back down. To recover from my “unassisted” ascent, I skied a leisurely loop over the plateau, then turned down the backside. On the icy corduroy my skis made an awful racket as I executed half a dozen slow, sweeping parallel turns. These landed me on the groomed apron of snow at the base of the hill.
I repeated the ascent-descent cycle ten times. To distract myself on the ascents, I imagined I was in the real Switzerland, surrounded by jagged, staggering scenery. This helped immensely in pushing me to the top. A ferocious tailwind helped too. To compensate for the latter factor, I discounted the vertical feet that I normally assign to that particular hill.
Having hit my goal for the outing, I skied out of the Matteral Valley, headed back to the French border, and hiked home to my village.
As I walked, I smiled in amusement thinking of all the trouble and expense to which my fine friends, then in Zermatt, had resorted. I’d accomplished the same thing—kinda, sorta—in a world of make believe, with little trouble and zero expense.
(Remember to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.)
© 2020 Eric Nilsson
